


a fall from far below

by vaudelin



Series: supernatural codas [11]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bodyswap, Domestic, Emma (Supernatural: Slice Girls) Angst, Episode Related, M/M, Michael Speculation, Mind Meld, Post-Episode: s14e03 The Scar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-20 22:52:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16564670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaudelin/pseuds/vaudelin
Summary: “Ready?” Castiel asks, extending his hands to either side of Dean’s head. “You’re sure about this?”Dean dips his chin. When Castiel yet hesitates, he curls both hands around Castiel’s wrists and tugs him gently into place. “You’re fine. Do what you need to do.”





	a fall from far below

**Author's Note:**

> thank you Remmy for kicking me until I finished, otherwise this would've gone to WIP hell

This time of night, the bunker is quiet. Beyond the occasional restless hunter, Castiel is the only one awake. He pads around the library, straightening the books left open on the tables and gathering discarded tomes for proper re-shelving tomorrow. It’s not enough to pass the evening, but such tasks help keep the worst of the night’s boredom at bay.

Castiel rounds the dormitory halls as he heads for the kitchen, intent on readying the morning rations for a chef better than him. The overhead lights are partly dimmed, leaving the bunker dark as well as quiet. He respects the hushed silence and moves light on his feet, through the halls with a familiar ease that scatters when a figure appears before him around the corner.

Castiel smiles, unseen. Even in darkness, he could place Dean by the slope of his shoulders, the tousled way his hair sticks up, the dampness from a shower still caught in his hair.

In the time since Dean returned, Castiel has hung back from approaching him, uncertain his welcome. For all that Dean seemed truly glad to see them all again, Castiel could sense resentment in him, too. For the time he lost, for the friendships that have strengthened in his absence. For how the bunker has moved on without Dean, forming a new routine that he hasn’t yet learned.

Castiel understands Dean’s need for avoidance, though he doubts how healthy it is to continue hiding from them all. He can only trust Sam to know how long is long enough, and be ready should Dean need him.

So far it doesn’t seem like he does.

Dean freezes when he realizes he’s not alone, looking ready to bolt back into his bedroom, and then relaxes as Castiel greets him in a whisper. The thick cuffs of his soft gray robe have been pushed up to his elbows, and in his arms are stacks of dirty plates, empty chip bags, and greasy cardboard squares. Dean frees two fingers from within his trash pile and flags Castiel to follow him, which he does, stepping into stride a step back from Dean.

“What’re you doing up this late?” Dean whispers, glancing over his shoulder.

Castiel smiles, fond. “Only one of us needs sleep. I should be asking you that instead.”

Dean snorts softly. They enter the kitchen, where Castiel flicks on the light and Dean makes an immediate beeline for the massive trash can Sam’s installed in the corner. Dean sorts his dishes from his garbage, cursing when a fork slips off his plate into the bin. Indecision flits over Dean’s face before ultimately being discarded. Dean carries his plates over to the sink, abandoning the fork to its fate.

“Might’ve taken too well to hibernating,” Dean jokes, flicking away a pizza crumb caught on his sleeve. His expression warbles, weakening with the weight of his embarrassment.

Castiel hums, leaning against the kitchen counter. “Even bears need to clean their caves from time to time.”

“That a fact?”

“No, they’re actually quite tidy animals.” The corners of Castiel’s mouth tilt upwards. “I only said it to encourage you to do the same.”

“Smartass,” Dean grumbles, though there’s no heat to it. He takes position across from Castiel along the counter, the angle giving Castiel a better chance to look him over.

Dean looks tired, paper-thin around his eyes. The residual humidity from the shower is the only thing about him giving a lively glow. Castiel worries for him, but they trust each other now. He doesn’t need to pry.

Dean opens his mouth, pauses. His gaze darts around the tile floor. “That hunt, when we went after Dark Kaia… I’m thinking, maybe we should be looking into, well...”

Castiel leaves Dean a moment to gather his thoughts, but when no further insight comes Castiel offers, “Jules and Marcus have uncovered leads regarding the material her weapon is made from, but nothing yet that Sam has deemed worthy of pursuing.”

“No, that’s not—” Dean winces, shaking his head when Castiel looks at him, concerned. “I mean, that’s not the part I’m worried about.”

Castiel bites his tongue, awaiting Dean’s response.

“If I think about it,” Dean says quickly, ripped from him like a bandage, “about Michael’s monsters, or this weapon, or whatever, the drive to find him…” His fist tightens. “Just hearing there was something that could hurt him had me going all night to find it.”

“Which is completely understandable,” Castiel says. “If we could find the weapon before him, it would mean a significant blow toward Michael’s plans.”

Dean shakes his head, frustrated. “Still not what I’m saying here, Cas.”

Castiel winces, chiding his continued misreading of Dean’s intent.

Dean scrubs his face, tightens his arms across his chest. “The push for that weapon, some of it was mine. But some of it, what it made me do… It didn’t feel like it was me.”

Castiel keeps quiet, waiting for his cue.

“Kaia said that me and him, we’re just like each other. One in the same, except I’m weaker.” Dean looks up, catching Castiel’s eye. “What if I’m not all me anymore? What if part of him is still inside of me, still pushing me toward his goals?”

Castiel leans back, straightening his trenchcoat around himself. He forces himself to think, to really consider what Dean is telling him. Why Dean is telling him anything all.

An archangel has been inside Dean for weeks, plotting and scheming while wearing Dean’s face, and then all of a sudden he disappears. No one knows where Michael has gone to, or why.

Dean is looking for help, for some confirmation that his fears are wrong.

Dean wants to be certain he’s free of Michael for good.

Cautiously, Castiel asks, “Would you like to search your memories again, to see if there’s any further leads we might find?”

Surprisingly, Dean seems relieved by Castiel’s suggestion. Castiel beams that he has finally read Dean right.

“If you do,” Dean asks, “would it be any different than the last time we tried?”

Castiel shrugs. “That scan had been pretty superficial. A run through as many accessible memories as we could reach. But if you suspect that Michael might have left some kind of trace inside of you, then it would likely be more recessed.”

“So you’re saying you wanna go digging through my dirty laundry?” Dean eyes him shrewdly.

Castiel balks. “I know not to read your mind. I would never dig—”

Dean puts a hand on Castiel’s shoulder. “Relax. I’m just teasing.” His smile sobers. “You can look anywhere you’d need to make sure Michael’s gone.”

Despite his own anxieties, Castiel feels the confirmation in Dean’s words, that his permission carries with it the trust Dean has in him.

Castiel reaches for Dean’s brow, though Dean hastily bows away. Before Castiel can second-guess himself, Dean clears his throat and asks, “Mind if we go somewhere more private? Not exactly keen on being caught out in my bathrobe here.”

Castiel nods. “Your room then?”

“Yeah.”

Dean leads them back down the hall to the dormitories, opens his door with a slow turn of the knob. He ushers Castiel inside, then crosses his room to turn on the nightstand lamp. Dean shuffles around the garbage on his floor, kicking the bulk of it beneath the his frame while mumbling something about Castiel interrupting his midnight clean.

Castiel crosses the room more slowly. He raises a pointed brow Dean’s direction, tilting his chin toward the half-dozen dirty plates currently littering his floor.

Dean dips his head. “Yeah, yeah, I know,” he mutters, moving further clutter off his sheets. He takes a spot at the foot of his bed, curling a leg up onto the mattress. Gruffly, he motions for Castiel to sit beside him.

Castiel takes position slowly, removing his trenchcoat first. Dean watches him fold it and place it beside him on the bed. He then blows out a breath, tapping his fingers against his bare knee. “So,” Dean says, shuffling around. “If Michael’s hiding, you figure he’s someplace deep.”

“Yes,” Castiel agrees.

“And if you’re digging around in, uh, repressed shit, am I gonna be able to see it too?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel answers honestly. “There’s not much of a science behind locating an archangel inside someone’s head.”

Dean snorts. “Right.” His mouth thins as he shores himself up, turning his back to Castiel.

Castiel is again briefly smitten by the slope of Dean’s shoulders, the way he looks almost relaxed from this angle, with his hands folded upon his calves. Castiel must resist touching Dean there, at the juncture of neck and shoulder. He keeps himself professional, and reaches for Dean’s temples instead.

“Ready?” Castiel asks, extending his hands to either side of Dean’s head. “You’re sure about this?”

Dean dips his chin. When Castiel yet hesitates, he curls both hands around Castiel’s wrists and tugs him gently into place. “You’re fine. Do what you need to do.”

Dean’s hands drop away and Castiel sighs, stifling himself from further reacting to the loss. With gentle pressure he cradles Dean’s head, softly moulding his palms along each temple, the tips of his fingers brushing into Dean’s hair.

With a quick slip Castiel delves in, dropping into Dean’s memories like a stone thrown into water. The both of them gasp, struck by the pulse of memories rising inside Dean, the rushing sensations that come as thoughts flow over them, overwhelming and unbidden.

Castiel thrusts toward the breadth of them, through the day-to-day mundanities they had visited before, and burrows his way deeper, into the memories that remain like bedrock beneath the rest. Dean recoils at the first touch Castiel makes against it, his breath hissing through his teeth; Castiel slows his pace and sends out a small tendril of grace alongside it, easing the pain as he digs through Dean’s buried memories.

Hell rises at the initial uncovering, the echo of Dean’s screams hitting Castiel like a concussive blast. Around him flashes knives and blood and piercing wails, the howl of hellhounds bright on his trail. The Mark scorches in his wake, red and terrible on Castiel’s inner forearm. Then shadows, and the bodies moving within them, the eyes of the dead staring after him. His time with Lisa, the empty hollow ringing through Dean so long as he remembered Sam’s sacrifice. How Dean felt guilty whenever he enjoyed this life, reminding himself that he didn’t deserve happiness like this.

Though he knows they are only memories, Castiel finds himself reaching out to this version of Dean, diving toward the curl of dreams that branch off from reality. Darkness swells around them, tight with pressure, and the vision of Dean is swimming in it, drowning, as Castiel plunges in and slips a hand around Dean’s wrist—

Castiel bolts upright on a bed plied with pillows, a heavy comforter falling to his lap. He gasps for breath and is jarred by how wrong it sounds, devoid of the rasp he’s grown accustomed to over the past ten years. He looks at his hands, but the room is dark, the windows blackened by a thunderstorm rumbling outside. Castiel reaches toward the bed’s edge, fumbling for the nightstand.

A hand slides loose from where it was tucked around Castiel’s hip, and a man behind him grumbles when the light comes on, grunting softly as he burrows into his pillow. Castiel jolts electric when his own voice mumbles its way up from beneath the sheets. “Turn it off, before Emma gets ideas.”

Castiel’s body locks tight with shock, vertigo hitting so fiercely that he can scarcely turn toward his bedmate. He pushes himself through the alien sensation, forcing himself to look at the other Castiel sprawled out along the bed.

Him. A second him. More tired and haggard, maybe, but definitely another Castiel.

“Sorry,” Castiel whispers, shocking himself again with the sound of Dean’s voice. He glances between his body and his bedmate, unable to believe that somehow, yes, that is Dean’s hands before him and yes, that is his own dark hair peeking out from the blankets beside him.

“Dean?” Castiel breathes, glancing around for where the real Dean—his Dean—might be. He touches his face, feeling the unusual shape to it. He hadn’t realized how well he knows Jimmy’s body now, how deeply he considers it his own.

This room doesn’t belong to the bunker. It looks more along the lines of the dwelling Jimmy and Amelia had owned, the second level of some standalone out in the suburbs. But it doesn’t make sense. Castiel has never shared a moment such as this with Dean, has never been in a room like this or swapped places, or—

Thunder rumbles, and though the sound of rain patters against the windows, there is nothing but darkness beyond the glass. The night sky pours out like shadows, smooth and absolute as submerged water.

Not a memory, then, not by any stretch of the imagination. Some sort of dream that Dean had deemed necessary to tuck away for good.

A sudden thumping noise carries rapidly down the outside hall, building with a childlike wail that bangs open the bedroom door. The dream Castiel groans and bunkers down deeper, apparently aware of what’s coming.

Quick as a dart, a girl no more than seven years old rushes across the room, her cries building as she throws herself into Castiel’s arms. He catches her on a half-formed reflex, his arms wrapping stiffly around her while she throttles him with her own fierce hug.

An impulse not his own leads Castiel to rub a weary hand over the girl’s back, squeezing gently at her shoulder. Dean’s voice rises within him, unbidden. “Bad dream again, baby girl?”

She squeezes him tighter, her sniffles mostly buried in Dean’s t-shirt. “Someone’s in my closet.”

Castiel hangs on the precipice of the moment, waiting to see whether the dream’s impulses will carry him through to the correct answer. The little girl has no patience for his indecision—she wriggles free of Castiel and crawls for the dream Castiel instead, her breath hitching through her retelling of nightmares and bedroom shadows they’ve clearly dealt with many times before.

“Can’t hear you, I’m sleeping,” the dream Castiel deadpans, through when she whimpers he immediately caves, his arms outstretched to encircle her. She goes gladly into the valley between them, settling in against the dream Castiel’s chest, her skinny legs still crooked across Castiel’s lap, all the while insisting something is wrong in her room. The dream Castiel moves softly with her, gentle in ways Castiel isn’t certain he himself has yet learned.

The surrealism of what’s happening catches him then, seeing himself comfort a child he doesn’t recognize, all while caught inside an imitation of Dean. Castiel stands outside of himself, looking in, while Dean stands without him, and yet within. Impossibilities stack until they form something unfathomably real.

As she calms, the dream Castiel obliges the little girl’s desire to rearrange his position on the bed. He shuffles aside, making space for her to settle between them beneath the comforter, and she pulls them in until she’s cocooned between their shoulders. She tugs and toys with Castiel’s fingers, drawing his hands over to his dream self, all while asking questions about the monster in her room, things for which Castiel has no context and which the dream Castiel cannot soothe with gentle murmurings against her hair.

The impulse to stay pours through Castiel like honey. This Dean wants so badly to lay here with his arm branched across his daughter’s back, the heat of his Castiel warming their communal bed. Thunder rumbles like a distant train, the sound of rain smoothing down any sharper sensations they might feel.

Castiel listens to his breathing, the sound of Dean’s own lungs filling in his chest.

“Do you want me to walk her back?” the dream Castiel asks in a low rumble, chin tucked above Emma dozing against his chest.

Dean’s hand moves of its own volition to the dream Castiel’s cheek, brushing it with his knuckles, though the script of the dream balks at him when he shakes his head and says, “Nah. Let her stay. I can handle it.”

He feels his mouth twist with a wry smile from Dean, something that his dream self reciprocates with a warmth and intimacy that Castiel is certain he has never dared to show Dean before.

An impulse to stay in bed curls again through him, so powerful it curves him briefly back to his pillow, but no matter how Dean might have enjoyed it, Castiel cannot stay, dreaming in Dean’s stead. He drops a kiss to the crown of the girl’s hair and ushers himself out of the bed.

The nightstand has no weapons, only a notebook and some intimate products. Castiel debates investigating the dresser, but as quickly he finds the baseball bat propped behind the door.

In the hall, the compulsion to go back to the bedroom grows stronger, building like wave. Castiel pads silently down the hall runner, listening to the house breathing around them, the creaks and groans that come as the building settles. The hallway has pictures framed along the walls—Sam and Eileen, Kevin and Jo and Ellen, the multitude of family and friends that hadn’t made it over the years.

In the photos, they all seem happy. Dean seems happy.

A door hangs open on Castiel’s left, not far from a staircase cloaked in shadows. He enters the room quickly, quietly, crossing the minefield of toys spanning the floor. A closet sits on the far wall, framed in with colorful posters and children’s drawing tacked to the wall.

Castiel braces himself, thumbing the design of the closet’s brass puller. The impulse to leave pounds like a heartbeat in his chest.

He then throws the closet door open, and as it swings it hits him with a literal wave.

Water rushes out from the blackened closet, flooding the room so quickly that it knocks the air from Castiel’s lungs. The wave’s force crushes him against the wall, pinning him. He struggles but cannot move, can only take in a choking wet breath. Darkness floods his vision and Castiel’s drowning, he’s drowning—

He gasps as Dean shakes him, his forearms gripped tight. “Cas. Cas, you okay? You were spazzing. What happened?”

Castiel plants both fists on the bed, gasping though he no longer needs to breathe. Dean shuffles around him, hand drifting to Castiel’s shoulder, at the ready should Castiel tumble over again.

Without thinking, Castiel asks, “Who was she? Emma?”

Dean’s grip tightens, then drops altogether. He scrubs his face. “I don’t think about that anymore.”

They sit in the silence together. Castiel glances over Dean, how his hair has dried from the shower, flattened in places by Castiel’s own hands. Now that his panic has subsided, Castiel can see that Dean’s piecing together what he saw while Castiel was drifting through his head.

“So it’s him?” Dean asks, quiet.

“I don’t think so,” Castiel answers, though his harsh exit from Dean’s memories suggests only one thing. “An echo. Maybe.”

“Maybe’s not much comfort.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Dean slumps over, digs his knuckles in around his eyes. Castiel doesn’t know what words might comfort him.

Quietly, Castiel asks, “Was it always like that?” The darkness. The struggle. The breathing.

With a heavy sigh, Dean stands. “Yeah. But that’s another thing I’m not...” He fidgets in place, his expression unreadable. Shaking his head, he turns away, shucking his bathrobe as he goes. “Not tonight, Cas. Please.”

Down to his nightshirt and boxers, Dean tosses both the bathrobe and Castiel’s discarded trenchcoat to the floor. He then folds down the bedsheets, moving as if Castiel’s presence is a well-versed part of his bedtime routine.

Castiel remains frozen at the foot of the bed, following Dean as he clears space on the nightstand for his phone charger and then pushes himself into bed. Dean rolls onto his side, his feet tucking into the sheets by Castiel’s hip.

On instinct, Castiel puts a hand atop Dean’s foot beneath the covers. Dean sniffs loudly, though he doesn’t pull away. “Yeah, no, you’re not creeping there all night. Get up here already.” Before Castiel can ready a protest, Dean adds roughly, “If you saw Emma, then you already know. Don’t make me ask for it, man.”

Castiel grips Dean’s calf, a gentle squeeze above his ankle. He then makes a slow approach for Dean’s half of the bed, removing his tie as he goes.

The mattress dips as he pulls into bed behind Dean, bullying his way into the space Dean has already claimed. Their knees knock and Dean glares at him, though he still cedes room to Castiel, shuffling backward toward the middle of the bed.

Castiel crawls into the space warmed by Dean, the air between them as thin as a skin. He brushes his knuckles against Dean’s cheek, soft as he had done within the dream.

 

**Author's Note:**

> rebloggable on [tumblr](https://vaudelin.tumblr.com/post/179915487263/a-fall-from-far-below).


End file.
